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This thesis examines the embodiment and disembodiment of Middle Eastern women in Suheir Hammad’s Breaking Poems (2008) and Solmaz Sharif’s Look (2016) to better understand how war, diasporicity, violence, and intimacy affect the socio-political subjection of Middle Eastern women in the United States. Through analyzing poetry, this thesis posits that Middle Eastern women’s subjection to racism and sexism as diasporic subjects in the United States leads to their disembodiment, resulting in feelings of displacement, loss, and uncertainty regarding their identities, which parallels the disembodiment they experience in the Middle East as a result of war. The Introduction Chapter answers why this thesis focuses on diasporic Middle Eastern women and the poetry of Suheir Hammad and Solmaz Sharif. Chapter One provides a theoretical framework of the major themes discussed throughout the thesis, such as embodiment, disembodiment, precarity, and double consciousness. Chapter Two discusses Suheir Hammad’s Breaking Poems with an emphasis on a hyper-individualized account of disembodiment. Chapter Three addresses Solmaz Sharif’s Look, focusing on poetry’s movement between different geographical spaces and time frames to present a wide range of disembodiment(s) experienced by not only Solmaz Sharif, but also by other Middle Eastern subjects. The Conclusion Chapter demonstrates that the theme of embodiment and disembodiment supports Hammad and Sharif’s efforts to give voice to the silenced experiences of diasporic Middle Eastern women. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)

The Right Reverend William Henry Marmion was consecrated as bishop of the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia on May 13, 1954, days prior to the Brown v. Board of Education decision and just over a decade after the Episcopal Church's General Convention formally opposed racial discrimination. A diocesan conference center in Hungry Mother State Park, purchased soon after his consecration, sparked a controversy that was to smolder and flame for the first decade of Marmion's 25 years as bishop. Marmion led the move to desegregate the diocesan conference center, Hemlock Haven, in 1958 and subsequently effected integration by closing three of the four black churches in the diocese and inviting members to choose a neighboring church to join. The initial integration of the diocese was a turbulent process that centered around Hemlock Haven. The diocese moved with some difficulty towards racial integration in a microcosm of what was happening in the wider Church and in the United States. Historical documents, secondary sources, interviews, and theoretical understanding of minority responses to oppression help me to describe this time of racial desegregation of the Diocese of Southwestern Virginia and its implications. Critical theory gleaned from W. E. B. Du Bois and from Homi Bhabha informs my understanding of some of the implications as well as many of the actions and outcomes. Du Bois's notion of double consciousness and Bhbaba's similar term hybridity, both of which acknowledge a dual locus of identity and of power, are relevant to understanding some of the interactions revealed by primary source correspondence. I will focus on Hemlock Haven as the entry point into desegregation and on the black churches in the diocese, both before and after that critical point, adding the witness of black voices to the white narrative of this history. A historical look at the trajectory of race and race relations in the Episcopal Church informs the moment of the caesura--an interruption--the desegregation of Hemlock Haven, and the fate of the four black churches in the diocese. From the point of the rupture comes identification, the emergence of a new space, a cultural reboot. / Ph. D.

This paper examines assimilation and double-consciousness in the poetry of Charles Simic, Marilyn Chin, and Susan Atefat-Peckham. Each of these three poets writes in English in an American setting but has a different heritage. Simic is a native Yugoslavian (Serbia) who fled Europe during WWII. Chin arrived in the U.S. from Hong Kong as a child, and Atefat-Peckham is a first-generation American raised by Iranian parents. Each of these poets expresses some degree of assimilation and double-consciousness (as described by various theorists including W.E.B. Du Bois and Werner Sollors, among others) through the form and content of their poetry. This paper compares the three poets' work, attempting to draw inferences on how double-consciousness and assimilation is expressed in their poems and to what degree. This study argues that Simic is the least assimilated (as his poetry portrays the most severe double-consciousness), Chin is in-between and Atefat-Peckham the most assimilated.

An analysis of the names and violence in Richard Wright's The Outsider reveals Wright's aesthetic program for the novel. Wright's recurring themes and the meanings of the name and aliases of his protagonist are indicative of African American vernacular tradition. Despite Wright's physical distance from African American life in the United States at the time of the novel's writing, he still conveys a strong connection to the African American experience, linking that experience with the suffering of all oppressed people. By using the idea of double-consciousness and various forms of signification, including masking, naming, and improvisation, Wright locates his work within the African American folk tradition and celebrates the freedom and subversive nature of African American expression.

Women leaders are grossly underrepresented in police and Army organizations and relevant research suggests that women face the most significant challenges in reaching leadership positions in male dominant organizations. Although there have been recent policy changes to increase opportunities for women in police and Army organizations, women are still barely represented in senior command and primary staff positions in police and Army organizations. When women are underrepresented, particularly at the most senior ranks, there are implications regarding cultural, structural, and attitudinal challenges that simply should not still exist in these organizations. Using qualitative methods, this study examined the experiences of women leaders, specifically senior leaders, in selected police departments and representative Army commands and staff support agencies. Specifically, the study explored the characteristics of effective women leaders to assess the perceived group affiliation of these leaders as it relates to these leadership characteristics and personal assessments of their leadership capabilities. The findings revealed that women leaders possess a multitude of characteristics that have set the conditions for them to break through the “Glass Ceiling” despite the many challenges and obstacles that exist within male dominant organizations. The findings indicate that women leaders in police and Army organizations are care-givers, selfless servants, over-achievers, and great communicators. They identify themselves by their performance and leadership acumen as opposed to their gender, race, or any other demographic descriptors. The findings also suggest that women leaders continue to be faced with challenges and obstacles that make it extremely difficult for them to become senior leaders and navigate up the chain of command within their organization, which impacts their ability to influence policy changes that could address some of these cultural, structural, and attitudinal challenges.

This thesis examines the politics of black identity in African American literature during what has come to be known as the ‘age of three worlds’. Across four chapters, I analyse texts by Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Lorraine Hansberry, exploring the way in which their writing plays out within and against the geopolitical exigencies of the Cold War and contemporaneous discourses of Civil Rights and black (inter)nationalism. In doing so, I explore the contrasting ways in which each of them displaces the binary logic that is typically seen as defining the 1950s, as a means of reconstituting both American and African American identity. Rejecting either/or identities, they all decentre prevailing notions of national and cultural identity by juxtaposing them with alternative spaces and temporalities, the result of which is a dual perspective that is simultaneously local and transnational. By extricating themselves, whether physically or intellectually, from a monolithic discursive framework, Ellison, Wright, Baldwin, and Hansberry recast the idea of double consciousness famously articulated by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Instead of being a self-negating non-identity that serves as the psychological corollary to African Americans’ marginalised status, ‘two-ness’ is transmuted into a privileged vantage point that allows them to both intervene on the world historical stage as empowered modern subjects and renegotiate their relationship with the United States. What this two-ness amounts to, I argue, is a kind of dissonance. ‘Dissonance’, Duke Ellington claimed in 1941, names black people’s ‘way of life in America. We are something apart, yet an integral part’. The principle of introducing a ‘wrong’ note into a piece of music in order to generate new modalities of expression found in jazz is transposed into a social and literary context by the writers examined in this thesis. Each of them embodies and mobilises the socially grounded sense of being apart and a part alluded to by Ellington as a means of defamilarising normative notions of race, gender, and sexuality as they pertain to American-ness. In their place, they posit alternative forms of knowledge and politicised identity that reconstitute what it means to be both black and American in the middle of the twentieth century.

This study examines the theme of hybridity in Charlotte Brontë’s novel Jane Eyre and Jordan Peele’s film Get Out. Both the narrative text in the novel and the script with visual elements of the film use the concept of hybridity through Gothic motifs: a mad non-white woman in the attic in Jane Eyre and a psychological place in Get Out, where members of a white family hypnotise black people in order to exploit their physical capabilities. This is employed to disrupt dominant discourses of authoritative class, revealing the ways in which these discourses are constructed through the exclusion of certain identities. Bertha Mason, the Creole wife of Edward Rochester in Jane Eyre, and Chris Washington, the African American protagonist of Get Out, both embody a sense of hybridity that challenges established norms of individuality and representation. Through a comparative analysis of these characters, this essay argues that hybridity serves as a means of exposing and subverting the power structures that reinforce presiding stereotypes of othered characters. By deconstructing these sovereign discourses, hybridity creates space for alternative voices and perspectives that are often excluded from ascendant literatures. Ultimately, this essay accentuates the importance of inspecting the intersectional identities of characters in literature and film, as a means of challenging prepotent discourses and promoting social justice.

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